The Denver-based Women s Global Empowerment Fund has made literacy training available to more than 100 Ugandan women. Founder Karen Sugar says it costs $50 to educate a woman for eight months.

Grace Akello Ouma made the leap from living in a Ugandan refugee camp to being a locally elected official who sells clothes, runs an agricultural project and owns her own restaurant. She cites a loan from Denver-based Women’s Global Empowerment Fund.

Denver’s Karen Sugar dreamed up the model for the Women’s Global Empowerment Fund as a grad student at the University of Colorado-Denver. For more information on the fund, go to wgefund.org.

Three years ago, Grace Akello Ouma was living in a refugee camp in northern Uganda.

Last month, she was elected to her local city council and now represents more than 4,000 neighbors.

What happened in between was a life-changing, $57 loan from the grassroots, Denver-based Women’s Global Empowerment Fund. The group loan allowed Ouma not only to start her own business selling produce but also to get health care, literacy training and peer counseling for a run at public office.

“This victory is not only for me but for all women in our program,” said Ouma, who visited Denver in December to talk with the cast of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s “Ruined.” The Pulitzer-winning play, opening tonight, is about women in the Congo whose experiences are hauntingly reminiscent of those of women in neighboring Uganda.

That fund program, launched by Denver’s Karen Sugar in 2008 with an initial $27, makes small entrepreneurial loans available to Uganda’s poorest women. Loans are allocated in groups so that recipients can support one another and share equal repayment responsibility. So far, more than 2,100 loans have been issued in average increments of $57. That might seem like a small amount in U.S. dollars, but in Uganda, it’s enough to start a restaurant, a chicken cooperative or even a small hotel.

And to date, not a single loan has gone into default.

Ouma is not an isolated success story in one of the most pillaged corners of the Earth. Uganda has been relatively peaceful since 2007, following a 25-year insurgency that Sugar says “went ignored by the entire planet.” During that time, she said, 30,000 Ugandan children were abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army and forced to become soldiers, sex slaves or wives of insurgents. The government’s response was to put 1.5 million displaced people into village camps, where they faced hunger, HIV and extreme poverty.

“Four years ago, these women had no idea they even had a future,” said Sugar. “Women who were being brutalized are now running businesses and sending their kids to school and running for political office. That’s a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.”

Grace Arach Kevin was abducted as a girl and spent eight years in bush captivity, during which time she was repeatedly raped and beaten. She bore two of her attackers’ children, she says, and was once forced to kill or be killed . . . so she killed. Rescued by government forces, she joined up with a loan group and now owns a business selling fruits. She is living on her own with her three children, having parlayed her initial $40 loan into $160 in savings.

“We’re not feeding her children,” Sugar said. “We are giving her the opportunity to create economic activity so that she can feed her own children.” It’s a personal achievement Kevin said she once feared to share.

“But now I will never be silent again.”

“Common experience”

Sugar dreamed up the model for the Women’s Global Empowerment Fund while attending grad school at the University of Colorado-Denver and raising two teenage daughters. From Day 1, it was a plan, not a classroom exercise. It was just a question of where, when and how her plan would be implemented.

Sugar’s driving force was helping women, she said, “because, as women, we all have a common experience.”

“No matter what we look like, or the color of our skin or our religious beliefs, we’ve all experienced violence or abuse, marginalization, oppression, a lack of adequate health care and the challenge of raising healthy children.”

She chose Africa, she said, “because there was the greatest need for women on the planet at that time.” A 2007 Denver Post story led to a $10,000 contribution that helped Sugar start a pilot program that, beyond giving loans, also focuses on increasing literacy, health care and stopping gender-based violence.

“We tell these women that living violence-free is a human right,” said Sugar. “It’s not a privilege. It’s not conditional. It’s not a maybe.”

But, she admits, whenever a woman in a patriarchal developing country experiences empowerment of any kind, there is often pushback.

A loan recipient was attacked by her husband with a machete, leaving her with a massive head injury and one of her children dead. While she recovered, the other women in her loan group continued to run the woman’s business, made sure her part of the loan was repaid, that her surviving children were cared for, and that she got the legal and medical care she needed. She’s now recovered — and on her fifth loan.

Despite that terrible incident, Sugar said, Africa is showing signs of progress in its gender attitudes. There is a quota of women who must be represented in Ugandan government, she said. And men support the help their women get from her program — once they see how it helps them.

“When you give a low-interest loan to a woman, you see the entire family potentially lifted out of extreme poverty,” she said. “Small loans in the hands of entrepreneurial women can transform a family, a village, maybe even a whole country.”

Happening now

Sugar has done all this to date with just $100,000, but demand is far greater than her organization can provide. Her mantra “is to work myself out of a job,” realizing full well a job of this magnitude will never be done.

She has been consulting with the creative team at the Denver Center on “Ruined” since reading Lynn Nottage’s acclaimed play last year. It’s a modern-day “Mother Courage” set in war-torn Congo, where an unapologetic matriarch both protects and profits from the women whose bodies have become “ruined” by the brutality of government and rebel soldiers alike.

“What is unusual about this play is that it’s happening right now,” Sugar said. “Women are being raped and families are being torn apart as we sit watching the play unfold.”

Central to the greater theme of exploitation is that the Congo holds the world’s biggest reserves of cobalt and coltan — minerals used in every video game, cellphone and computer. And they’re extracted through slave labor by the very people Sugar is trying to free from an ongoing cycle of economic brutality.

“We need to know in Denver that how we live here actually creates poverty and violence in other countries, often without our even knowing it,” she said. “I think the play is presenting us with a fork in the road: It’s asking, Once you learn about something that is happening in our world, what are you willing to do about it?

“These are horrific conversations to have. But the women in our program are a shining example of what’s possible, even after enduring horrific brutality and violence.”